For Whom the Bell Tolls

One of Paramount's prestige pictures in 1943, when Katina Paxinou won an Oscar for best supporting actress, and the film picked up nominations in virtually every major category - but not in writing and in direction, and that's the tell. As an American fighting with the partisans in the Spanish Civil War, Cooper makes a perfect Hemingway hero, robust and romantic in equal measures. Falling in love with Ingrid Bergman's peasant guerilla makes a lot of sense too, but the film's a mess dramatically. Wood approaches the material with kid gloves, when Hemingway was always a bare-knuckle fighter. Most later prints were tightened dramatically by being reduced to 130 minutes.